Why I started Go Well

For 7 years, I oversaw the development of a leading wellness platform, from high-level strategy to detailed specs. Our roadmap was always full, resources were limited, and everyone on the product team was busy with a million things on their plate. Sound familiar? We created a lot of great wellness programs, but I always had my eye out for more. Programs are, after all, the heart and soul of wellness. Without them, all the analytics in the world aren’t worth a thing.

I wanted to bring fresh new programs, new approaches, and a wide variety of well-being topics to our participants — more programs than we could create internally. Or at least, more than we wanted to create. Good programs take a lot of time, money, craft, and thought. I figured someone out there must be building interesting programs I could easily drop into our portal.

But it wasn’t so easy. The solutions out there were either heavily engineered, and would take a long time to integrate, or (on the opposite end) little more than articles and simple content. I needed programs – wellness programs. Structured, oriented, multi-week, and packaged up with promotional materials, logos, and additional content. Oh, and easy to integrate.

I finally decided that such a thing didn’t exist. After all, every wellness vendor has their own proprietary technology, business logic, data structure, and content management capabilities…

Then it occurred to me. For years, I had been consuming massive numbers of podcasts. Everywhere I went, I took my phone, and as soon as I had a second, the podcast player went on. I could hear any topic I wanted under the sun, on demand. Walking, driving, exercising – it didn’t matter where.

I also realized that podcasts were no longer a niche. Everyone was talking about them. Heck, everyone HAD one. Everyone was plugged into streaming audio, and not just podcasts but audiobooks, music, and internet radio. Well, maybe not everyone, but (according to those who track media metrics) at least 50 million people listened to podcasts alone. And the popularity of these formats was growing every year.

Audio as a medium is as old as the hills, but now with the explosion of mobile phones, everyone wanted targeted, on-demand content. Audio programs are intensely engaging – we all respond to storytellers and relevant conversations – and, best yet, they are extremely easy to drop into any portal or app.

And that’s why I started this business, Go Well. To explore audio wellness programs… private-labelled health podcasts… wellcasts… (there is no name for this yet) … in all of their possibilities. I am focused on this all day every day, so you don’t have to.

Contact me and I will send you a mini-white paper on the unique benefits of audio, and all the interesting things you can do with it that even video can’t touch. I look forward to the conversation. – Greg Juhn